Goseong (Gangwon)

Surrounded by pine forests, Hwajinpo Beach with its white sand was a foreigner-exclusive summerhouse during the time of Japanese imperialism. The surrounding scenery is so beautiful that it was the summerhouse of Kim Il Sung and Rhee Seung Man after liberation from Japan.This area also became famous for filming the popular drama Autumn in my heart and now many fans come to Hwanjinpo to collect a sample of the beach sand.

The house is embedded in a cliff where you can have a bird's eye view of the beautiful Hwajinpo beach. There is an exhibition of Kim Il Sung's personal belongings including furniture. On the stairs up to the summerhouse, photos are displayed of Kim Jeong-il during his early days.

As the observatory closest to North Korea and the Northernmost point of the ROK, more than one million people visit this area on an annual basis. Visitors can see the Geumgangsan (Diamond Mountains) and the Haegeumgang in North Korea, with the naked eye, and unlike many other observatories, photographs are allowed everywhere. In the observatory North Korean food products are for sale, and the North Korean beer is actually quite good. Several Clunky North Korean-made Viewmasters give three-dimensional slide shows of idyllic scenes from the DPRK, with commentary in Korean, for a 500 Won coin. The windy road to the observatory brings forth a sense of tension due to the barbed-wire entanglements along the coast and soldiers stationed on alert at a checkpoint along the approach. Tickets and passage papers have to be obtained 4km before the first checkpoint or you will be made to turn around. The building to obtain these papers is not hard to find, it is on the left as you drive North just after the "World Mineral Museum," but the sign 100m before it is only in Korean.

This museum exhibits 40,000 articles of 1,500 types of shellfish, corals and fossils some very rare.